Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images In the autumn of 1999 Tony Blair was attending the opening of a nursery when he was confronted by an elderly woman holding a sign. The sign was an early expression of a view many people would come to hold over the following decade. It read: “Blair, you are a c***”. The reason this “typical sweet granny”, as Blair remembers her in his memoir,  My Journey , was annoyed was that under his government, the state pension was due to rise by the rate of inflation, which had just hit its lowest point in 36 years (1.1 per cent); the result was that the sweet grannies were going to get an extra 75p per week, which they thought was stingy (even though it was the same increase in their spending power they’d had in previous years).…